september 11, 2001

9:30 AM

The phone had been ringing furiously since early morning; we'd ignored it, as usual, until some nascent speck of social conscience made me go answer it. I woke my roommate. "It's for you," I told her, and went back to bed. Two minutes later, I heard the television raging in my living room and came wandering out to investigate.

While we were asleep, the face of America had changed. Our people were at peace.

Now we are not.

It sounds strange. Someone has declared war on us, on our land. Not since World War II has a battle been fought on American soil. Our soldiers have fought and died in foreign countries, our Congress and our President has thrown weapons and money at battles around the world, but as a people, we stayed innocent, untouched. We demonstrated; we carried signs bearing the names of dead soldiers; we sympathized in a detached way with parentless orphans; we watched the news coverage of massacres in Africa, bombs in Ireland. Then we changed the channel. "Not us," we thought. There were oceans to guard us. "Never us." We were annoyed that our soldiers had died. "What does it have to do with us? This isn't our problem. Bring them home." And we did. And foreigners died.

I don't know how I feel. I won't know for a while. I feel -- hollow, I think. The sky is blue, and the day is grey as ash. There's a snake coiled inside my stomach, and it moves from time to time, pressing against my chest wall. I can hear my heartbeat in my throat.

For months, I've been watching as Bush separated America from the global problems facing humanity and been irritated. Not irritated enough. I didn't pick up the phone, didn't write a letter, didn't do any of the things that would make me less guilty than he of policy. I was just irritated.

We removed ourselves from the world.

Now the world has come to us.

4:30

I watch Peter Jennings on the news and notice he had ink marks on his palms. One of his hands shake; his eyes are red-rimmed and under the makeup, his nose is swollen. For the first time I see the plane, a living bomb, explode through the World Trade Center. One of the scenes is of a man hurtling through a window and plummeting to his death from the top of one of the burning buildings. I hug my elbows and shake with horror.

Grief isn't pretty. Grief isn't sane. Grief is ugly, and irrational, and scary. I watched on the news while the capital of Afghanistan was bombed and for one savage, frightening moment, was glad. Then I was ashamed.

The office was quiet today, except for the blaring of televisions in cubes. I brought one in, and we hooked it up to the cable lines. The news was endless, and it was beginning to repeat itself; the rest of my team huddled close to it anyway, gathering in small groups whenever it could for comfort, maybe. Everybody else went home -- only my group remained on the floor, determined to force some normalcy to a day gone mad. I couldn't concentrate, couldn't work, couldn't do anything but look for more news or dream up random, impossible ways for me to help the survivors in New York and Virginia. I left early to take one of my teammates to the station, and then drove to a blood bank to try to donate. The line stretched around the corner -- "There's a four hour queue," one woman told me, hugging her crying son to her chest as though she'd never let him go. Her eyes and nose were puffy; her face was drawn and lined. She set her jaw grimly. "I'll wait," she said. "I'm O-negative. I'm a universal donor. It's all I can do."

I went back to the car, put my head on the steering wheel, and let myself cry.

5:00

"...a date which will live in infamy."

All through the day now, there have been comparisons between the destruction on the East Coast and Pearl Harbor. I wince when I hear them say it; in all these years, I've never admitted to the shame I carry with me, racial shame, ethnic shame, about the actions of Japan during the war. Every movie about the Pacific Theatre, every reminder about what my people did to America, to their neighbors, hurts me. In Japan, they ignore that portion of history, burying their nation's sins in a new generation's ignorance. I am American, of Japanese descent, and I lack that luxury. I hold up stories of the Purple Heart Brigade and the Japanese Internment camps and bandage them across my heart, only to have old scars opened again by reminders in the media, or in books. In the West Coast, Chinese grocers put up signs declaring that they were not Japanese, but were beaten and harassed anyway, simply for being Asian. I can't fathom how the generation before mine felt, torn by their love of their country, and the hate their countrymen heaped on them in return; to learn to be ashamed of being their parents' children, and to regard the face in the mirror as the enemy.

Already, there are reports of attacks on people of Arab descent, of taxicab drivers of Iranian ancestry being pulled from their cabs and attacked, of people being spit on because of the color of their skin. I hear these things on the radio, and I'm blinded by the same rage I felt when I watched the towers fall. Not at them, but at the people who would be so contemptible, so despicable, as to treat them as the enemy because they look a certain way or speak a certain way. We are all Americans, first generation or third, and to deny them that basic right, the right to call themselves Americans that was promised them when they came here or were born here, degrades the memories of those people who died. People who died, just because they were American. How dare they. How dare they? If we feel sick to our stomachs at this atrocity, how much worse for those who can look at the rubble and think, my people might have done this. This blood flows in my veins.

I'm frightened for my friend, whose father is Palestinian. She lives in Berkeley. I can't reach her; I want to hear her voice and have her tell me that she's okay, but the service tells me she's unavailable. I don't want to leave a message. What will I say to her? It's easier being frightened for someone else than for us all; it gives me a face, someone to care for. Someone I can, maybe, help, if only to tell her that I love her. I'm frightened for the vulnerability that none of us realized we had. I'm scared that the backlash of this will cause another world war, one that could destroy us all. I'm worried that racism will be exacerbated in this country, and that it will destroy other, innocent lives in the days to come.

I know what I feel now, and that's something, anyway. I watch the footage of a little group of Palestinians celebrating outside of a store, watch a little old woman who could be the grandmother in the apartment above us throw up her hands and dance, grinning. I can't understand how someone could rejoice in the suffering of other people. And then I realize I would grimly celebrate, that we would all dance our own wild dance, if we inflicted on the terrorists some of the suffering they inflicted on the hijacked passengers, the dead firemen, the injured and the dead.

I feel violated.

I'm remembering what it feels like to hate.

I can't help myself.

And that scares me most of all. Posted by yhirata at September 11, 2001 12:15 AM